• Socsa@sh.itjust.works
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    10 months ago

    More than one person lives in a building generally. It’s more like $15,000 to install 1kW of solar, so like $15B to install 1000MW, so you literally could have just about installed the solar capacity with just the cost overrun.

    • elephantium@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      More than one person lives in a building generally.

      Gee, really? I never would have guessed /s

      More seriously: It’s very quick to search “population of GA”, so that’s what I did. If you have a different figure you’d prefer to use, feel free to post it.

      It’s more like $15,000 to install 1kW of solar

      Uh, what? $15,000 = $15k which is what I wrote. I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here.

      • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
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        10 months ago

        Ok, $15k x 10M is just an order of magnitude too high of an estimate is all. I was just adding more context.

        • elephantium@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          No, order of magnitude is 10x off. You can’t massage the numbers enough to get there with any reasonable assumptions.

          Obviously the average household size is not 10 people, but let’s be generous and say that it’s 5 people, so you’re looking at 2 million houses. Rooftop solar installation costs between $10k and $30k per building. Frankly, in this context, $15k is generously low as a cost estimate.

          Also, go back and re-read my original comment in this thread. The context was the idea of spending $30 billion on installing solar panels everywhere instead of building the nuclear plant. Flippant, sure, but – actually, the numbers aren’t far off even with these sandpaper-rough estimates.

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      10 months ago

      There’s some hidden assumptions in there that aren’t quite warrented.

      First, when quoting output, solar tend to state their peak output at full sunlight. How much they actually put out depends on the area, but reducing the number to 20% is a good rule of thumb.

      Second, you seem to be thinking of rooftop residential installs. Those are the most expensive way to do solar. In fact, levelized cost of energy studies show it’s almost as bad as nuclear. Home installs have trouble taking advantage of the economics of mass production. Making a dedicated solar field is far more cost efficient. So much so that nuclear looks pathetic on those same levelized cost studies.